Present: The Wonderland War, London
M y lungs are about to burst out of my chest as I’m running after Constance.
The ashen weather deprives my vision but I glimpse her every once in a while, scraping the asphalt and screaming at the snaky vines pulling her away.
“Constance!” I shout. “I’m coming.”
I think the plants can listen to me because they deliberately swing Constance in the air every time I call her name.
Then they don’t only swing her but swirl her back at me as if she is tied to the tip of an Indiana Jones whip.
Hopelessly I even try to grab her or hang on to her a couple of times but the inertia is too strong to deal with.
It breaks my heart that she gets so close to my face and then disappears again.
“Let her be you obscene…” my attempt to scream at the plants is futile and incomplete because I don’t actually know what it is.
I have a feeling that it would talk back to me like back in Wonderland but I’m not sure.
Panting, the memory of Jack and me back in Wonderland attacks me again. I’m staring at the dark figure of the Jabberwocky, a silhouette of darkness that I wish I could see clearer.
Then another thought attacks me: who is the Jabberwocky? Is it possible that he is someone I know? No one ever reported seeing his face.
“Alice!” Constance laughs hysterically as the plants swing her my direction again.
I fall back to avoid the plow and watch Constance in pain. “What a rollercoaster!” She says.
My admiration for her grows by the minute. In her darker hours, she still finds humor. Sick humor maybe. But still humor nonetheless. I wonder if her being a child makes her stronger than the rest of us. No baggage or dark past. Fresh bones and soul thrown into the world and hardly capable of understanding the gravity and complexity of our existence.
I stand up again and run after her.
The plant slithers farther into a darker ruin of London, and I find myself disoriented and confused, standing still, not sure which direction to go.
“No!”
“Constance!”
“Don’t leave!”
“Come back!”
“I won’t let them take you.”
My succession of verbal desperation is interrupted by a voice. A girl’s voice. Not Constance though.
“You want her, come and get her,” the voice says.
I can’t see the girl’s face but I have heard her before. An evil girl who once lived in a mirror.
Memory attacks and I realize this is the voice I heard entering the Looking Glass. This was the girl who lived inside—or at least talked on behalf of the mirror.
“Show yourself,” I demand in the dark.
“You remember me?” She teases.
“Partially,” I circle around the invisible axis from head to toe, trying to squint and locate her. “Looking Glass.”
“Oh, so you do remember,” the girl says. “You also know that I’m the plant that took your beloved Constance, yes?”
“I assumed so,” I nod. “So you’re everything? The Looking Glass. The plants that talked in Wonderland? Who are you really? What are you doing in the mirror?”
“Shhhh,” she demands. “Too many questions.”
“At least give Constance back to me. This is between you and me.”
“Always has been.”
Silence.
More silence.
Loud enough I hear my jagged breathing. The faint beat of my heart. And the faint vibration in my sword. I think me and the Vorpal are slowly becoming one.
“So?” I ask.
“I will give you Constance,” the plant says. “She isn’t of much use to me, though she is a child and smart, and you know how much I like to devour children.”
“I don’t know about that. Just let her be.”
“Only if you tell me what you meant when you said ‘I know what the mushrooms are for.”
I smirk, “It scares you that I’m starting to put things together, ha!”
“You’re smarter than I thought you’d be, Alice,” the plant muses. “But also dumber than you think.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” I stick out my tongue. “Just let her go and I will tell you what I figured out. And by the way, should I still call you Malice?”
I’ve recognized the voice once she talked. She sounds like me but isn’t like me. It’s a slight resemblance only I can feel. Part of it is scary because when she talks, I feel like my chest resonates a little as if she is using my soul. But I understand we’re attached, yet not the same.
“How does it feel talking to yourself?” She says. “Does it drive you insane?”
“Nah. I’ve talked to myself too many nights in the asylum.”
“You mean to me.”
“Whatever. I don’t like you. It doesn’t matter.”
“Not liking me means you’re not liking you.”
“I don’t like my toes, a little too big, but still they’re mine. Shit happens.”
The plant laughs.
“So you’re me but you can also take the shape of a plant and kill people all around?”
“I’m one of many plants, and I was bored with chopping off heads, so I decided to kidnap Constance and play.”
“Don’t you have anything to do? Are you so much bored out of your mind you just want chaos?”
“What else should I do? Life has no meaning and no resolution. I just want to party before the party is over when I grow old,” she snickers. “Now tell me what the mushrooms and plants are really doing?”
“Free Constance first.”
Constance drops from the sky right into my arms, like a piece of heavy meat. I struggle to stabilize my body while not dropping her. The poor girl is covered in sticky worms.
“What have you done with her?” I shout upward.
The plant descends from the dark sky and shows itself to me in the dark. It has two big weird eyes like a frog’s. The rest is just a dancing vine that is pretty much thick in diameter like five fire hoses strapped together.
Her eyes, even though like frogs, look like mine.
“She will wake up,” Malice the plant says. “Don’t worry. I kept my promise. Now you tell me what you figured out.”
“This mushroom thing isn’t a war between Inklings and Black Chess,” I say.
“Listening.”
“Well it is, but that’s not why the mushrooms and the plants are growing out of the earth. It’s neither a precise war between good and evil.”
“Then what are the mushrooms and plants her for?”
“It’s an invasion.”
“Whoo, hoo!” She tries to mock me. “Who’s invading the planet? Aliens?”
“No,” I swallow hard. “Wonderland.”
The creepy plant smiles. She doesn’t have a mouth or opening, but the curvature pantomimes a smirk. “Wonderland.”
“The mushrooms are taking over this life, turning it into Wonderland. You, Black Chess, or whoever planned this long ago. That’s probably why the Pillar has so much interest in mushrooms. Not just a profitable hallucinatory drug, but a weapon to invade this world.”
“I’m impressed, Alice,” she says .”Maybe you are the chosen one. So if Wonderland is invading this life, what is the Wonderland War about? Between whom and whom?”
I know the answer. I should have known it a long time ago. The Pillar had always hinted at it. “This is a war,” I say. “Between fact and fiction.”